Thursday, September 2, 2010

Exiting Tieto

Tuesday was my last day at work at Tieto. The exit process was a real pain in the neck (this ties to my earlier post where I said my team is pretty insular, so I hadn't dealt heavily with other departments at Tieto for a while...). There was a lot more paperwork involved than when I quit First Insight (my employer before that went out of business, and I got fired from the one before that...). I had to get a half dozen signatures from various managers around the office in different departments.

Three of those managers were people I'd never met and didn't know on sight and didn't know where their desks were located. Not one of them would be helpful enough to give me instructions on how to find them in the office. One, the payroll guy, was nice enough to tell me that his desk was located "in the office" (uh, yeah, duh!), but cut off all communication when I asked for somewhat more precise directions. Fortunately one of the women in HR, Vijaya, was assigned the task of following up on my exit paperwork and asked if I needed any help, so she gave me good instructions how to find them.

I had a couple of project related meetings in the afternoon, so I waited until after that to get the IT department's signature, in case they took my computer, which I needed. Good thing, too, when I went to their office and said I needed to do the paperwork they cut off my network account before I ever made it back to my desk. Fortunately I'd already copied the document I was working on and had to hand off to another teammate to the file server first, and I also emailed it to three people just as a backup.

Before that I also wrote a couple of farewell emails, one to my team specifically and one to all the people I've interacted with in the office, whether teammates or even just people I never talked to but always shared a smile with in the hallways... That came out to over 50 people...

My department had a small party with cake to celebrate the department's birthdays and give me some flowers. I made a lousy speech that I was unprepared for.

Then I went to the HR department for their signature, only to find their office empty. Someone sitting nearby said they were all in a meeting. That was about 5pm. I went back around 5:10pm and they were still out. At 5:15 they were still out and I started to worry that they might return, but being late in the day just pack up and leave without checking emails or things.

So, I sat patiently on a filing cabinet outside their office until their meeting finished at 6:35. And even then the paperwork wasn't done. There was some confusion about my missing a signature of a nonexistent manager. The form had a space for a "configuration manager" but neither my solid-line manager nor my dotted-line manager knew what that was, let alone who that was. By the time HR got back and explained that my solid-line manager needed to sign there with "not applicable" my solid-line manager had already left for the day for some follow-up medical tests (he was really sick earlier this year, with typhoid plus a serious kidney infection simultaneously that left him hospitalized for a few weeks) so it wasn't possible to get that.

The HR guy said he'd follow up with my solid-line manager the next day and get the forms, email me a PDF and courier the original to my address... Of course, now Thursday is finished and I haven't received it yet...

After that I turned in my ID badge and key card, then the HR people escorted me out of the secure part of the office, into the reception area. I guess they do that for all exiting employees. They didn't make me feel like I was suspicious of anything and chatted cheerfully on the way out about my experiences in India and what my plans are for going home.

Then I waited there for a while for my teammates to finish work so we could all go to La Pizzeria for a team dinner and a farewell for me. My original plan was to go home, shower and things, then get picked up at my apartment, since they have to drive right near it anyway. But with HR's extended meeting I just waited for another fifteen minutes in the reception area instead, without taking a rickshaw home.

Dinner with my team was fun. I guess since I joined Tieto after I was already getting homesick here in India I'd never really talked to my teammates before about the good memories I had of earlier in my stay in India, so a lot of that came out. Someone even commented that they never imagined I'd eaten at as many restaurants as I talked about, since by the time I joined Tieto I was rarely ever eating out anymore.

Tuesday turned out to be a strange day to finish a work week. It's left me quite confused as to what day is what since then...